Former President Donald Trump will win the Georgia primary, CNN has projected. However, as the numbers come in, the suburban areas of the Peach State look worrisome for the Republican presidential candidate.
While Trump is expected to win by a big margin, it is notable that Nikki Haley — his longest rival in the primary season who has now dropped out — is still winning a significant share of votes in the Peach State.
More specifically, earlier in the night, Haley was taking 35% of the vote in Chatham County, which lies on Georgia’s shared border with her home state of South Carolina. The county, that has a big African American base in Savannah, voted Democratic in 2020.
“The suburbs have trended Democratic, which is what helped Joe Biden win this county by 19 points,” CNN’s John King explained, adding that this should be one of the focus areas for Trump in the next eight months.
Muscogee County is another area of Georgia to examine. While it is a huge Democratic county and is likely to go for Biden, King said Trump’s efforts should be aimed at shrinking the margin when it comes to battleground states like Georgia, where close elections are won by a relatively small number of votes.
Remember: Biden won Georgia in 2020 by less than 12,000 votes.
As more of the results come come in, Haley continues to cannibalize Trump’s votes in areas like DeKalb County and Fulton County, which are the big population centers that delivered Georgia to Biden in 2020, ultimately winning him the presidency. So it appears that Trump continues to be weak in the same Georgia areas as he was in 2020, King explained.
This post has been updated with additional results from Georgia’s GOP primary.
Source: www.cnn.com